FLORENTINE FOOTBALL

Wairarapa Times-Age, 12 July 1938, Page 9

FLORENTINE FOOTBALL

FOURTEENTH CENTURY GAME. When Herr Hitler visited Signor Mussolini recently one of his calling places was Florence, and among the things he saw there was what is described as “the ancient game of Florentine football, played by men in fourteenth century costumes, which Tuscans claim to be the ancestor of modern football.” But an ancestor for that game which only went as far back as the fourteenth century would be itself a bit of a stripling or newcomer, for some claimants to the distinction of having provided the originse of football are reckoned as very

much more ancient than mediaeval Florence. The Greeks had a game which they played with a kind of ball called the “harpaston,” and, according to Smith’s “Dictionary of Antiquities,” “It was the game of football, played in much the same way as with (is, by a great number of persons divided into two parties opposed to one mother.” But the Romans had a blown-up ball called the “follis,” and though to begin with that was struck by the hand, some authorities say that :t was afterwards “kicked from side to side over boundaries.”